


hunters

by blackholenipples



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/F, F/M, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-11-13 12:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18032066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackholenipples/pseuds/blackholenipples
Summary: Paula Crock dies, leaving behind a husband and two daughters.





	1. prologue: mission

**Author's Note:**

> I don't do scheduled updates. I have no idea when the next chapter will be up. sorry!

“I’d take you with me.” dream-Jade says, zipping the bag. The canvas is stiff under her fingers and she can hear Artemis’s hitched breaths, trying to hold back tears.

“Mom’ll come back. Somebody needs to be here when she does.” 

Jade closes her eyes and swallows. She sighs, takes two steps over to where Artemis is perched on the edge of her bed, blue eyes huge with unshed tears. Jade drops to her knees.

“Art—” Jade clears her throat, tries to be softer “—Artie she’s dead. Mom’s not coming back and you need to disappear before Dad does.” Artemis shakes her head and tears fall onto the cotton bedspread. Jade frowns and stands up. She grabs her bag and heads towards the door.

“Then I guess it’s every girl for herself,” Jade says with one last look over her shoulder. As she walks out the door and out of the dream, she hears Artemis’s voice. A child’s voice, full of some emotion far beyond her years. Jade might be projecting, but she thinks it’s disappointment.

“See ya, sis.”

\---

Jade wakes up and she throws off the covers and stumbles out of bed. She rushes to the bathroom in time to throw up into Ollie’s million-dollar toilet bowl. She heaves, bile burning its way up her throat and eyes burning from the fumes and the weight of her guilt. After a few minutes, she stops heaving and registers a soft touch on her hair. The hand is holding her hair back, not rubbing circles into her back, so it’s Roy, not Dinah. 

“We’ll find her.” Roy says. His voice is sleep-soft but filled with conviction. 

Jade turns to sob into his chest. He holds her, strong and safe, until she’s cried herself out. There’s always more tears to be shed over Artemis, but there’s never enough certainty about her fate for them to last. 

“What if we do. And she’s Dad’s daughter?” Jade asks, weak in the mornings around Roy the way she can’t let herself be anywhere else. 

“Then we find her,” he says as though it’s that simple, “and we teach her. The way you taught yourself to choose to do the right thing.” 

He drops a kiss on the top of her head and gets up. He offers her a hand up, smile soft in a way he never is around other people. Jade takes it. 

“You and me, Jade.” Roy says, squeezing her fingers, “I promised. We’ll fix it together.”


	2. first contact

“Red Arrow, this is Cheshire requesting backup. Robin and I could use some long-range support.” Jade's voice crackles over his comm and Roy doesn't even think about the fact that he's technically refusing to work with the junior justice league right now before he's running rooftops towards her coordinates.

“Red Arrow copies. ETA five minutes.” He says, while he swings furiously across the city.

“Robin here. Our adversary is a shadow with aim that could rival yours. we may not—” the channel goes quiet for a few seconds and Roy's heart rate jacks up, “—we may not last five minutes.”

Rob only uses the bat-robot voice when he's trying to hide that he's either seriously hurt or terrified.

Roy spies a sporty-looking Honda on the street below him and swings down. He lands behind the driver. The dude stops the bike with a screech and a string of curses. As Roy kicks him off, he hands over one of Ollie's credit cards that links to the expense account for exactly this reason.

“I'm buying your bike!” He shouts over his shoulder and guns it. He weaves through traffic with the kind of reckless speed that makes him want to shout whenever Dinah does it.

On the bike, he makes it to the alley less than a minute later. Jade's got her swords locked with some chick in terrible tiger stripes and Rob's slumped against the wall. Tiger-chick shoves. Jade moves with it, leaping back and out of the way. Roy tumbles off the bike and it keeps going, straight towards her. She just barely sees it coming and stumbles out of the way. The bike crashes against a building in a cloud of fire and noxious smoke. The assassin pulls out a rebreather and it's a long enough pause for Jade to be back on her, short swords flashing in the dark. Roy fires. The assassin blocks Jade with a longsword dripping red. She retreats a step and Jade switches from swords to sai. The first two arrows miss, but the third cracks her mask. Jade swings towards her middle but the assassin blocks with a serrated knife and drops the sword. Her hands move independently and no wonder Jade and Rob couldn't take her, because she's fighting off Jade and dodging his arrows like they aren't two of the most vicious non-meta combattants in the hero business.

Roy fires an electric goop arrow and turns to check if Robin's dead. The little bastard's disappeared. Roy suppresses the urge to groan as the assassin dodges the goop and then grin when she gets struck by the shockfield.

Robin drops down out of nowhere to lock her arms up and Jade kicks out her legs and snatches the knife headed towards Robin's ribcage with a snarl. She presses it to the assassin's neck and the woman spits her rebreather out towards Jade's face. Jade lets it hit her cheek without a flinch and the assassin grins, nasty and full of teeth. Neither Jade or Rob make a move because they're creepy ninja. Roy just sighs and takes off the mask covering the top half of her face. There must be some magic connected to the mask, because as soon as he takes it off her dark hair turns golden. she looks him right in the eyes and Roy can't breathe. He hears Jade's harsh inhale and has to turn to make sure she's still at his side. Because the girl on the ground could almost be a clone if it weren't for the hair.

“Hey, _Chesh_.” She smirks. Her voice makes him take a closer look, and while they have the exact same nose and forehead her eyes are wider set and her lips aren't as full as Jade's. She's also a good decade younger.

“Artemis.” Roy says, stunned.

She laughs. “Tigress, actually. I'd say it's been fun, but I don't like lying that much. See you around Jade. Don't let those broken arrows get you down.”

Artemis winks. A silver javelin comes flying down from above them and slices Jade's forearm open. She leaps back on instinct. Tigress lurches to her feet, throwing Robin over her shoulder as she does and something in the motion triggers a smoke bomb. Coughing, Roy looks up in time to see Artemis hanging from a ladder dangling out of a sleek, soundless jet. She gives them a wave as the ladder is pulled back up into the cockpit and the jet turns.

Sportsmaster glances down on them from the pilot's seat and the cockpit closes. The jet speeds off into the night and Roy swears.

His words are echoed and Roy turns to see Rob, lying on his back with a hand clutched over the edge of the armour panel covering his chest. “They stole the fucking batplane. No tracking.”

“Not important right now.” Jade growls. “I thought she missed.”

“She's as good as any Arrow.” Rob laughs. the creepy hyena sound echoes a little off the walls around them. “Some people don't miss.”

Robin's eyes flutter shut just as the rest of his team arrives on scene in the bioship.

From what he pieces together from the shouting between the martian and Wally, there's a broken arrow halfway through his right lung. The bastard snapped the shaft and kept fighting with a punctured lung.

“He'll be fine,” Jade tells him hours later, “it took four hours to clear out his lung after they pulled it out, and it'll be two months before Robin's back in the field, but he'll be fine.”


	3. Besties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise Artemis is evil and we'll get to see that sooner or later. This chapter spans about three months, because I didn't want to write a bunch of developing friendship and Artemis's adventures in high school. Also, I want Robin back in the game. The team is doing their thing, but slower and Artemis and sportsmaster just don't see a lot of it.

Artemis knows Roy Harper. Her sister’s boyfriend. But she also knows Arsenal, the one-armed boy-ghost who needs a memory wipe every month and shoots a crossbow better than a gun. He’s the best training partner she’s ever had because he’s fast, he’s fun and he doesn’t stop working. He’ll keep going until he falls flat on his face from exhaustion and then get up rather than let her win a spar. He’s also the worst mission partner she’s ever had because he’s compassionate, he fights the false memories and he won’t kill. Dad taught her to use a bow and arrow, but Arsenal teaches her to love the weapon. To say he reminds her of Jade would be a lie, but being around  ~~ Roy ~~ Arsenal reminds her of the way she used to feel around Jade. Like she had someone on her side. Roy Harper is the most dangerous person she knows, and she’s not talking about the one who has been referred to as Black Canary’s equal in hand-to-hand.

It’s why she says nothing when Ra’s separates them. They’re an excellent team, but Arsenal makes the dissonance she feels around the league worse. They failed an abduction mission, not because of a lack of skill, but because neither of them had been willing to kill the preteen prince for a shot at the sister. It’s an unacceptable act of mercy. They’d both known and they both made the decision anyhow. 

Ra’s sends her to her father. She will be running a mission in Gotham. Nobody tells her what will happen to Roy. They don’t need to; everyone knows failed experiments get put away. 

***

Artemis has a first day at highschool every few months. She's good at undercover work, and with Jade's team interfering in shadows missions across the globe, it's important to keep on top of the current trends in teenage culture and foster certain individuals towards careers in politics. She's not particularly nervous, but pretends to be. She twirls her hair and resists the urge to try and tug her skirt down to offer a little protection to her knees. The shoulder-length chop is super weird and it took Dad almost an hour to thin it out the way he wanted, but the end effect is that it looks like silky white-person hair instead of the more-identifying blonde mane. With a little bit of very specifically-applied makeup and green contacts, she barely looks like Paula at all; any resemblance to Jade will be dismissed pretty easily as a coincidence.

It’s too bad she’ll have to stay out of the Tigress suit for the duration of the mission, but at least this explains why Talia keeps handing her spf 60 and telling her to use it. 

“Diana? I’m Bette, your new student liason.” A pretty blonde says, walking towards her with a smile. Bette Kane, sixteen years old and Batwoman’s niece, adopted after her parents died in a car crash,  according to the mission documents. Close enough to Dick Grayson to provide an excuse to be around him without being a close enough friend to warrant a deeper background check. She’d pass, but why risk it. Bette will be perfect. “Welcome to Gotham Academy.”

“Thanks,” Artemis says with a smile, “I’m Diana Jackson,” she pauses to interrupt herself with a chuckle, “but I guess you already knew that. It’s nice to meet you.” The bell rings and Artemis swallows. “Any chance you know where I need to go to get to AP calc?”

Bette grins. “It’s actually my first class. Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

Artemis nods.  _ This is going to be a beautiful friendship.  _

***

Bette has never really had a best friend before. Babs and Dick are kind of a duo, they’re her friends but they’re closer to each other than they are to her. But Diana looks to Bette first when there’s group projects in class, they go shopping together and they’re studying or gossiping at each other’s houses whenever their spare time lines up. Bette is used to being too much, too intense for most people, and intimidating between student council, gymnastics, swimming and her GPA. But Diana gets up at five to work out with her dad in the mornings, she does computer club, gymnastics team, cross-country team, fencing, boxing and she’s got a 4.0 too. They can do sleepovers and cook and aunt Kate lets them have a glass of rosé with dinner like adults or Diana’s dad John will actually talk to them about politics and current events and listen to their responses like their input is worth something. He starts teaching her to box during Diana's morning practice and they're the best teachers she's ever had. It’s wonderful and Bette wants to let Diana know somehow that she’s the most important person in her life after aunt Kate. 

They’re huddled under the covers, because Bette feels like talking about Batman should be something hidden, done under the shelter of her duvet where aunt Kate can’t hear. “I think it’s Babs. Batgirl.” She whispers. Instead of looking at her like she’s crazy, Diana just purses her lips and tilts her head to the side a little. 

“I think so too.” She says. “They have the same hair, and Babs texts faster than anyone else I know. Except for Batgirl in that one video of her on top of the bridge with Robin.”

Bette can feel some of the tension drain out of her shoulders. Diana doesn’t think she’s stupid, she agrees with her! And she’s totally into Babs, so she probably pays more attention to her than most people. It’s good and she takes a deep breath. 

“She’s not the only one, you know.” Bette says, voice dropping even softer than the half-whisper she’d used in the first place. “She’s the second Batgirl.”

Diana’s smart, she’s so insanely clever, because she only takes a few moments to process before her eyes go wide. “Dick says you tore your ACL in Freshman year. But you didn’t do it playing tennis, did you?” Bette shakes her head and tries to hide her grin as Diana continues. “The first Batgirl is like an urban legend. The current one’s on Instagram and she’s awesome, but you’re literally a Gotham cryptid. That’s so cool.” 

Bette grins. That was basically the exact reaction she’d been hoping for. She been getting restless. Swim season is over, and Diana just had her last cross-country meet last week. Babs is a good batgirl, but Gotham could always use another vigilante, and who doesn’t love a dynamic duo?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of Bette notes since I've decided to completely butcher canon:  
> -her parents died in a car crash when she was ten, she got adopted by a 21-year old Kate who dropped out of West Point to do so (Bruce was out of the country at the time and not given the option)  
> -her parents were a corporate lawyer who worked too much and a native Hawaiian swimmer-turned socialite who didn't have much time for her  
> -she grew up very aware of the societal expectations to which she would be expected to adhere  
> -a brilliant athlete, she became bat-girl at thirteen and held the title for about six months. She did a partial tear of her ACL in her final match at the French open when she was fourteen and tore it completely that night trying to stop a rapist  
> -she hung up the cape and her tennis racket until the day she was completely healed from her surgery but got into gymnastics because she wanted to get closer to dick  
> -she's good at people, just really not great at interacting with people in her age cohort. Dick's kind of a friend but Kate is really the only person who really knows Bette (there's no secret identities between them)  
> -she, Babs and Artemis are two years older than dick but he skipped a grade because yj canon says he's a giant nerd and he's taking the highest math classes he can get his hands on


End file.
